certify pains that make you want to throw large objects

gistfile1.md

When creating expense

• All of the expenses need currency specified individually. There is no way to specify currently at the expense report level.
• Location should be definable at the Expense level and persist through all of the receipts. Currently have to specify location on each receipt. Super time waster.
• No ability to rearrange items within a day to reflect the actual flow of events.
• No ability to flag expenses as "follow up" or "double check of accuracy"
• The app flags same value transactions as potentially duplicates even when they have different receipts attached, took place in different cities, or generally have fundamentally different characteristics. 
• No way to accept flagged transactions as 'not duplicate'.
• When pressing 'cancel' Website presents a completely useless dialog box prompting - "are you sure you want to cancel" even though no changes have been made and data is already saved. There is no reason to ask a user if they're sure since there is no risk of data loss. Useless 'feature', annoyance and a waste of time.
• Conversely, when a different item is clicked on via the 'pencil' edit button, the website does change to that item, even if modifications to active items were made. All changes are immediately lost with no way to recover. Some kind of warning box that could be disabled sure would be nice.
• No way to specify common expense categories. App should realize (learn) that after 20 expenses there are only 4 categories that I use, and should rearrange these on top of the list.

Receipt upload

• Receipt upload happens within the active expense window - No way to upload the receipt without opening another tab or leaving the current expense window/project. 
• Clicking the receipt upload button (which is for some reason red and completely not intuitive) doesn't present a dialogue box notifying the user that all of the changes are about to be lost.  *No easy way to get back into the current project after receipt upload (unless it was done via another tab).
• Receipts uploaded via 'file upload' are not marked with a " + " mark, making it unnecessarily difficult to identify unassigned receipts.
• There doesn't seem to be the 'auto fill' functionality available on the website that's available on my cellphone.

Other UI issues

• No way to extend the expenses window.  Meaning that if I have a 28" monitor, I am using roughly a third of the screen. This is generally an annoyance if I want to see more than 5 transactions in detailed view. 
• Category drop-down - using the keyboard to specify the first letter of the category takes you to the item, which is good. However if the item I'm looking for isn't the first one for that letter, I have to either use mouse or keyboard to get there. Example - if I want "Travel - Meals" I have to press T, then either use a mouse to scroll down or press down, down, down, down on the keyboard. Most modern websites allow much easier navigation by combining one of more of the below
  • a - cycling through the items on repeat pushes of the 'first letter'
  • b - allowing user to type the keyword and having the drop-down filter out the item(s) matching the keyword.
  • c - place the hotkey item into the middle of the drop-down menu, or at least 5 items from the bottom, so that a user could still see items below the 'hotkey' item. Presently the hotkey item is the bottom-most item, which is annoying as user cant see any of the items below.
  • this is all provided by standard libraries written years ago.. UI 101… just saying.

Thanks for the great list, @alexvinyar. I have some more items to add too, but my initial view of Certify is that it seems like a throwback to a mid-2000s web application. It seems like they've never actually contracted with UX designers or researchers to run through the flows for common operations and/or taken any actions based on those outcomes. Also, the look-and-feel is super dated. I've been using it for almost 2 years at this point and it doesn't seem like they're making any major improvements at all.

Compare and contrast the UX of Certify against Harvest (yeah I know, Harvest isn't an expense reporting system but it has that as a component).

..
"...
I know this gets put out there occasionally. If Certify let me link my personal CC's and selectively import relevant expenses, I--and many others at Chef--would have worlds more love for Certify. Those imports would also receive a default marking of "I paid for this, reimburse me".
..

Hello Folks, Certify CTO here.

@vinyar, thank you for the detailed feedback. We have added a lot of your suggestions to our feature request list. As a user of Certify you are probably aware that we actively solicit end user feedback on a quarterly basis, allowing all users to enter feature requests. We review every submission and act on them based on frequency and careful consideration. But this list will be very helpful for us, so thank you! Here are some notes in reply...

. Regarding currencies for each expense line item.. Yes, that is correct there is no expense report level currency selection. However, each user has a default currency that applies automatically. As you use the web form to enter multiple expenses, if you change the currency to another one it defaults to that for your next entry, until you change it back. So yes, there is no currency specified at the expense report level, but the default is specified at the user level with expense line item override and added convenience while entering expenses that is pretty much exactly as if it had been specified at the expense report header level.

. Regarding the same issue with Location, that's a good point. We have added that to our feature request list. If you use Certify Mobile, it does a fine job of making it very easy to enter previously used Location values using an auto suggest functionality. We definitely recommend entering your receipts using Certify Mobile (about 90% of users use Certify Mobile for this purpose) so give that a try.

. Rearranging expenses within an expense report - good idea! They are sorted by date, but without any secondary sort. Adding this to our list.

. Flag as "follow up" - that's a great idea. Thank you for that one.

. Potential Duplicate flagging - the behavior you describe is by design. The point is to assist approvers and accountants in identifying potential duplicates, as well as to help submitters know what approvers and accountants are going to pay extra attention to. The logic for this is based on the same date and amount/currency. There is no way for a submitter to indicate that the expense is intentional and not a duplicate, however, so thanks for that suggestion. That would help approvers and accountants chill out in the case of legitimate expenses that do appear at first glance to be duplicates. Got it.

. Cancel / Edit confirmation issue - got it, thank you for that! That's embarrassing, but thank you.

. Commonly used expense categories - that's a nifty idea. Thanks for that.

. Receipt Upload issues - good point on the icon color, that is lame it is red! You can get back to the expense report draft that you were working on in a single click by using the Quick Links panel where there will be a link straight to the most recent expense report drafts. That said, most users of Certify use Certify Mobile for loading receipt images, rather than Upload. Upload is definitely kind of the old skool way of doing things, so consider just using CM, taking a photo and synchronizing, and then clicking the Refresh icon. This way you never have to leave the expense report draft page, which is much nicer.

. Receipts uploaded not having + icon - yes, that is correct. The + icon indicates that a receipt has metadata associated with it, which typically comes from using Certify Mobile where you can optionally enter expense information about a receipt just after taking a photo. But Uploads do get parsed with ReceiptParse, and if you choose to use Upload you can click on a receipt and the blank add expense form will be populated with whatever data ReceiptParse could recognize from the uploaded receipt image.

. The ReceiptParse function (Auto Fill in Certify Mobile) runs on every receipt that passes through Certify, and it happens automatically as soon as they are loaded, no matter what method you choose for receipt upload. But the metadata + icon is only there for data that the user visually entered. Perhaps we will consider changing this so that ReceiptParse data is treated as a first class citizen, though, because the accuracy is very good assuming that the receipt image itself is good.

. No way to extend the expenses table - excellent comment, got it! We do this in the approval page, but not in the draft page. We should be able to do this without much trouble.

. Regarding the Expense Category drop-down and selecting values using the keyboard - the behavior you are describing is built into most modern browsers already. We see Chrome 39, Firefox 32, and Internet Explorer 11 doing this. Safari seems to not work this way, however.

. Regarding placing the hot key in the middle of the list, we see IE 11 working this way, but Chrome, Firefox and Safari do not work that way. We will see if we can find a CSS or JavaScript method to do that on all browsers. Thanks for that!

. Lastly, Certify offers personal credit card integration (as well as corporate card program integration of course) but your company has to have it configured. Just ask your Certify administrator and they can call us to have it enabled. It can be configured so that all personal card expenses are imported as Reimbursable, and also so that you can delete individual expenses so that personal expenses are easy to not include in your expense report.

Thanks so much!

Hello @sbates, we thank you for your comments as well! Here are some replies...

. Regarding entering meals expenses in the web app, there is always a default value of "Me" if the expense category is not set up for entering detailed attendees. If it is set up for entering detailed attendees, there is a default entry of your first name, last name, and "self". Not sure why you are not seeing that behavior, but if you could call the Certify Support line, our support experts will capture repro details.

. Regarding changing Billable for an entire report - that's a great idea. I'm pretty sure that's on our list along with changing Reimbursable in bulk. We will ensure that is ticked up on the list!

. Regarding the drop-downs causing a post-back - yes, we use AJAX for the Expense Category drop-down so that we can load the appropriate fields for each type of expense category. We take every effort to optimize for low bandwidth situations, but I think airplane Wi-Fi is a test scenario we need to consider! As an alternative, you may find that using Certify Mobile in offline mode is a vastly superior experience when on an airplane. Using CM, you can enter receipts and expenses with metadata and then synchronize when you have connectivity.

. Regarding emails receipts - I think you are describing HTML emails that are converted to a screenshot of the email. If so, that is a good point - we should increase the resolution on that screenshot so that it is more clear and readable. Other than that, we don't shrink any images so what goes in, comes back out.

Again, thank you for your feedback!

Hello @juliandunn,

Thanks for your general comments regarding the UI and UX. In some ways you are correct that we are using technologies that were popular in the mid 2000's, such as HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. And yes, I agree that our current look-and-feel is not the latest. But please note that in the past year we have been focused on implementing Responsive Design so that our web application works nicely in a browser window from 1600 pixels wide all the way down to 320 pixels wide. Furthermore, we are planning a general UX update in the near future. The trouble is that users come to expense reporting with so many variations of pre-conceived notions of how it should work. This is a category that has been around for probably 15 years or longer. We have features and workflows that are unique to Certify (leveraging ReceiptParse, Auto Expense Reports, and ReportExecutive) but we can't really force all that on every user. So you can see what the challenge is that we face. Oh, incidentally, all of those items (ReceiptParse, Auto Expense Reports, and ReportExecutive) were developed in the past 24 months, so that should give you some insights as to what we have been busy doing in the past 2 years. More to come! We have been doing this since 2009, and we always envy the new entrants who have the ability to start fresh with 2015 technology right from the get-go. Still, we are looking forward to our next UX/UI enhancement round, so stay tuned!